=head1 NAME
perlfaq9 - Networking ($Revision: 1.15 $, $Date: 2003/01/31 17:36:57 $)
=head1 DESCRIPTION
This section deals with questions related to networking, the internet,
and a few on the web.
=head2 What is the correct form of response from a CGI script?
(Alan Flavell answers...)
The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) specifies a software interface between
a program ("CGI script") and a web server (HTTPD). It is not specific
to Perl, and has its own FAQs and tutorials, and usenet group,
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi
The original CGI specification is at: http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi/
Current best-practice RFC draft at: http://CGI-Spec.Golux.Com/
Other relevant documentation listed in: http://www.perl.org/CGI_MetaFAQ.html
These Perl FAQs very selectively cover some CGI issues. However, Perl
programmers are strongly advised to use the CGI.pm module, to take care
of the details for them.
The similarity between CGI response headers (defined in the CGI
specification) and HTTP response headers (defined in the HTTP
specification, RFC2616) is intentional, but can sometimes be confusing.
The CGI specification defines two kinds of script: the "Parsed Header"
script, and the "Non Parsed Header" (NPH) script. Check your server
documentation to see what it supports. "Parsed Header" scripts are
simpler in various respects. The CGI specification allows any of the
usual newline representations in the CGI response (it's the server's
job to create an accurate HTTP response based on it). So "\n" written in
text mode is technically correct, and recommended. NPH scripts are more
tricky: they must put out a complete and accurate set of HTTP
transaction response headers; the HTTP specification calls for records
to be terminated with carriage-return and line-feed, i.e ASCII \015\012
written in binary mode.
Using CGI.pm gives excellent platform independence, including EBCDIC
systems. CGI.pm selects an appropriate newline representation
($CGI::CRLF) and sets binmode as appropriate.
=head2 My CGI script runs from the command line but not the browser. (500 Server Error)
Several things could be wrong. You can go through the "Troubleshooting
Perl CGI scripts" guide at
http://www.perl.org/troubleshooting_CGI.html
If, after that, you can demonstrate that you've read the FAQs and that
your problem isn't something simple that can be easily answered, you'll
probably receive a courteous and useful reply to your question if you
post it on comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi (if it's something to do
with HTTP or the CGI protocols). Questions that appear to be Perl
questions but are really CGI ones that are posted to comp.lang.perl.misc
are not so well received.
The useful FAQs, related documents, and troubleshooting guides are
listed in the CGI Meta FAQ:
http://www.perl.org/CGI_MetaFAQ.html
=head2 How can I get better error messages from a CGI program?
Use the CGI::Carp module. It replaces C and C, plus the
normal Carp modules C, C, and C functions with
more verbose and safer versions. It still sends them to the normal
server error log.
use CGI::Carp;
warn "This is a complaint";
die "But this one is serious";
The following use of CGI::Carp also redirects errors to a file of your choice,
placed in a BEGIN block to catch compile-time warnings as well:
BEGIN {
use CGI::Carp qw(carpout);
open(LOG, ">>/var/local/cgi-logs/mycgi-log")
or die "Unable to append to mycgi-log: $!\n";
carpout(*LOG);
}
You can even arrange for fatal errors to go back to the client browser,
which is nice for your own debugging, but might confuse the end user.
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);
die "Bad error here";
Even if the error happens before you get the HTTP header out, the module
will try to take care of this to avoid the dreaded server 500 errors.
Normal warnings still go out to the server error log (or wherever
you've sent them with C) with the application name and date
stamp prepended.
=head2 How do I remove HTML from a string?
The most correct way (albeit not the fastest) is to use HTML::Parser
from CPAN. Another mostly correct
way is to use HTML::FormatText which not only removes HTML but also
attempts to do a little simple formatting of the resulting plain text.
Many folks attempt a simple-minded regular expression approach, like
C<< s///g >>, but that fails in many cases because the tags
may continue over line breaks, they may contain quoted angle-brackets,
or HTML comment may be present. Plus, folks forget to convert
entities--like C for example.
Here's one "simple-minded" approach, that works for most files:
#!/usr/bin/perl -p0777
s/'"]*|(['"]).*?\1)*>//gs
If you want a more complete solution, see the 3-stage striphtml
program in
http://www.cpan.org/authors/Tom_Christiansen/scripts/striphtml.gz
.
Here are some tricky cases that you should think about when picking
a solution:
>>>>>>>>>>> ]]>
If HTML comments include other tags, those solutions would also break
on text like this:
=head2 How do I extract URLs?
You can easily extract all sorts of URLs from HTML with
C which handles anchors, images, objects,
frames, and many other tags that can contain a URL. If you need
anything more complex, you can create your own subclass of
C or C. You might even use
C as an example for something specifically
suited to your needs.
You can use URI::Find to extract URLs from an arbitrary text document.
Less complete solutions involving regular expressions can save
you a lot of processing time if you know that the input is simple. One
solution from Tom Christiansen runs 100 times faster than most
module based approaches but only extracts URLs from anchors where the first
attribute is HREF and there are no other attributes.
#!/usr/bin/perl -n00
# qxurl - tchrist@perl.com
print "$2\n" while m{
< \s*
A \s+ HREF \s* = \s* (["']) (.*?) \1
\s* >
}gsix;
=head2 How do I download a file from the user's machine? How do I open a file on another machine?
In this case, download means to use the file upload feature of HTML
forms. You allow the web surfer to specify a file to send to your web
server. To you it looks like a download, and to the user it looks
like an upload. No matter what you call it, you do it with what's
known as B encoding. The CGI.pm module (which
comes with Perl as part of the Standard Library) supports this in the
start_multipart_form() method, which isn't the same as the startform()
method.
See the section in the CGI.pm documentation on file uploads for code
examples and details.
=head2 How do I make a pop-up menu in HTML?
Use the B<<